Description

This is an extension pack of cards for the “short” and “long” vowel wordbuilding card games. It cannot be used as a stand-alone deck, so please only get these cards if you already have the other two games. For the cheapest way to buy all three sets of cards, click here.

Like the other two games, this one provides practice blending and manipulating sounds in one-syllable words, and learning their spellings. However, it contains harder spellings, so is suitable for learners who have mastered the basic alphabet plus some consonant digraphs (“sh”, “ck”, “ng” etc) and split vowel digraphs (“a…e” as in “take”, “i…e” as in “like” etc), and are now learning other ways to spell these vowels, and additional vowels.

The game contains a variety of vowel spellings as well as some less common consonant spellings not included the earlier games. Spellings that players don’t know can simply be left out of the game, and added in as they are taught. If you’re not sure whether a child knows a spelling, just show it to them and ask what sound it represents.

There are example words at the top of each card showing possible sounds for each spelling, with the most common sound(s) first e.g. the spelling “oo” usually sounds like it does in “soon” and “look”, and only rarely sounds like it does in “blood” and “brooch”.

Watch videos of two different ways to play the game here:

A more strategic game which uses card numbers for scoring (if you’d like to do a little arithmetic practice too) is here:

This game also provides opportunities to learn about how  spellings typically combine in English e.g. we put “ve”, “se” and “ge” after “ur” as in “curve”, “nurse” and “purge” and many other two-letter vowel spellings, but “ve”, “ss” and “dge” for these sounds after “short”, one-letter vowels, as in “have”, “mess” and “fridge”.

These cards are supplied as a downloadable pdf file (two A4 pages) which you print in colour on paper or light cardboard, laminate if you will be using the game a lot, and cut up (or ask kids to hone their scissor skills on it). Put an elastic band around each of the decks, and you have small, cheap, portable edutainment. Save it to your computer so any lost or worn out pieces are easily replaced, or you can make extra copies.